SAVE THE DATE: Emergency Robot competition to take place on 15-23 September 2017 (Piombino, Italy)

The European Robotics League announces place and dates for new Emergency Robots competition: Piombino (Italy), 15-23 September, 2017.

THE CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS IS OPEN!

The deadline for the first phase of the application is 3rd April 2017 See details HERE and the invitation below

"Dear friends and colleagues,

the European Robotics League (ERL) is glad to announce the dates for the major tournament of the ERL Emergency Robots competition. The ERL Emergency 2017 challenge will be held in Piombino, Italy, in the surroundings of the Tor del Sale power plant, from 15-23 September 2017.

ERL Emergency Robots is a civilian, outdoor robotics competition, with a focus on realistic, multi-domain emergency response scenarios. Inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident, the ERL Emergency challenge can only be met when land, marine and flying robots work cooperatively. The competition itself sees International teams of various disciplines and organisations surveying the scene, collecting data, searching for missing workers and identifying critical hazards, all in a race against the clock.

This competition builds upon the success of euRathlon2015 Grand Challenge, the first world’s robotics multi-domain competition that took place in Piombino, Italy in September 2015; and aims to push the state of the art in heterogeneous cooperative autonomous systems for emergency response.The challenge is open to universities, companies and industry interested in applying the results of robotics research and development to real world challenges.

Team matching will be possible before the event and will be helped by the ERL Emergency Robots consortium, so it is not mandatory to cover the three domains by just one team.

ERL Emergency Robots 2017 is expected to go beyond the competition boundaries, aiming to cross-fertilise multiple robotics domain and foster discussions within the robotics community. ERL Emergency Robots 2017 will also provide a forum where roboticists from different areas can exchange ideas, show the state-of-the-art and outline the future of robotics research not only in Europe, but in the whole world.

The European Robotics League is mainly funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme for research, in the framework of RockEU2 project (grant agreement n° 688441) coordinated by euRobotics and supported by SPARC. ERL is the natural evolution of a series of highly successful previous competitions that were established via FP7 funded projects: RoCKIn, euRathlon and EuRoC. All three projects aimed to foster scientific progress and innovation in cognitive systems and robotics through the design and implementation of new competitions.